My game is illegal, so I released it for free

Two weeks ago, I released Gas Station Dick Pills, a free adult visual novel about a college dropout getting more than he bargained for when he accepts a cursed dagger that allows him to hypnotize anyone he wants for six hours. My visual novel is, as you might suspect, a short story about hypnosis, non-consensual sexual encounters of the heterosexual variety, guilt, revenge, and murder. It's also super fucking illegal for very stupid reasons.

Hypnosis

Credit card companies have decided that hypnosis falls under "non-consensual content", and they don't support anyone making money from it. As of January 2026, around 70% of adult content platforms either ban or heavily restrict hypnokink content. I've yanked my info from The Vilification of Hypnoporn, an excellent article by Jude D. Grey.

I want to implore to you, dear reader, that hypnosis isn't real. Or, at least, not the common perception of it. In the real world, there is limited evidence that hypnosis is effective. A system review of meta-analyses found positive effects when using hypnosis to treat children undergoing medical procedures, but that's a far cry from getting a random adult to take off their clothing for you, like what happens in my game. No, hypnosis in adult fiction serves several narrative purposes:

To allow a subject to become submissive "against their will"

To allow a dominant to assert absolute control

To create non-consensual roleplay scenarios

Hypnosis can also be used to enhance other kinks, like bondage, orgasm control/denial, and bimbofication. Again, I must stress, that hypnosis is real in the same way that John Wick is real: Only when you believe him to be.

Truth be told, hypnosis is perfect for writing a short adult story because you can go from strangers to fucking by counting down from three... two... one...

Why write about this

I've been in a pretty terrible headspace for the few weeks preceding this game's development. As I wrote in my last missive, I feel like the sky is falling on the games industry, and I'm changing careers entirely. I've also been working on my game SuccuDeck almost three years now, and it's been getting harder to make meaningful progress on it. What I needed was a small win.

Every story starts with a simple idea. I had a vision of a young man walking into a convenience store with a mysterious dagger that allows him to hypnotize the cashier. I scrambled to write it down. An excerpt from my outline:

You march back inside. Katie hasn't moved at all. "Hey uhm... could you look at this for me?" Katie sighs and looks at the dagger. Her eyes turn glassy, just for a moment, and then she just smiles blissfully. "What... just happened?" "You've hypnotized her for the next six hours." I did what?! "Yeah, she'll do anything you want. Give it a try!"

What will he do with that terrible power? And where did he get the dagger from? From that small scenario, I radiated outward. What kind of sex should I include? How did the young man end up here? Before I knew it, I had written 1,700 words, when I previously struggled to write a hundred.

A royal pain

Last year, I challenged myself to make a game for InkJam 2025, which became A Royal Pain in the Ass. I'm proud that I was able to ship 9,000 words of adult fiction in a week, but something felt unfinished. The story I wrote was completely linear, with no meaningful player choices, and I didn't feel like I was using the visual novel format to its full potential. For this next game, I wanted to go bigger and bolder. And boy, did I feel that!

I spent two weeks developing Gas Station Dick Pills, or exactly double the time I spent on A Royal Pain in the Ass. That includes writing 11,000 words in a branching narrative, making 6 collage art backgrounds, and writing a whole new tech stack for it. What is obvious in hindsight is that a branching narrative is much, much more complicated to write. It's very easy to get tangled up in your choices and lose track of where the story is supposedly heading.

My actual writing process comes down to outlining, outlining, and outlining. For every scene, I write something quick and dirty, just to get from start to finish. I include important dialog snippets, but nothing substantial. Then I pull it apart. For example, I wrote this (partial) outline for one of the endings:

Two paramedics, Joe and Megan, are checking out a crash site at an overpass. "The call came in fifteen minutes ago," says Megan. "One victim, male, absolutely pancaked." Joe makes a face. "Don't say that." Megan pretends to flip her chart. "That's what it says here: Absolutely pancaked. It's the medical term, apparently."

And here's how their dialog ended up in the game:

{THE_PARAMEDIC_MALE}: The call came in fifteen minutes ago?

His partner, {THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}, nods as she stands by the ambulance.

Her blonde hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail as she pores over the clipboard in her hand with a serious expression.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}: One victim. Male.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}: Absolutely pancaked.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_MALE} makes a face.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_MALE}: Don't say that.

She flips through the chart, feigning surprise.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}: That's what it says here.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}: Absolutely pancaked.

{THE_PARAMEDIC_FEMALE}: It's the medical term, apparently.

She shrugs.

However, when it comes to writing adult fiction, I can't tell you what is worse: Writing sex scenes, or not writing sex scenes. Because writing sex scenes is like staring into the abyss until it winks back, but not writing sex scenes feels like you're not giving the people what they want (sex scenes).

The final version of Gas Station Dick Pills has four endings. Not because I'm indecisive, but because every one of them felt like a natural conclusion. None of them are "good" endings, and I don't consider any of them to be the canon ending. At the story's conclusion, you either give in to the terrible power of the Lewd Dagger, or you find out, in some gruesome way, that the cycle of abuse cannot be broken. The difficulty was to make these endings feel natural.

Choice architecture

Unsurprisingly, I had to make a whole dang flowchart to keep track of everything. There are multiple small decisions the player makes, like if they check out the cashier when first entering the store, that ultimately affect which ending they get. Because if they don't check out the cashier, they don't end up buying a sports drink, and they have enough money for condoms, which ends the game early.

But making the flowchart was also useful to highlight that I had a giant bottleneck at the end of the game. After the initial sex frenzy, the main character contemplates what to do next, and I essentially gave the player a choice of which ending they wanted. I ended up rewriting this section to incorporate previous choices and automatically sort them into a specific ending, which felt a lot more natural.

Tech stack

On my previous visual novel, I used Lit and inkjs, a JavaScript implementation of the ink scripting language, to create a completely browser-based experience. And while I use Lit on my main game project too, I didn't feel it was a good fit for these smaller projects. To explain briefly, Lit is a lightweight framework around browser functionality to create widgets with custom logic. But if you use Lit "properly", you're required to use the Shadow DOM for your component styles, which I've found fussy and annoying to work with.

For this new game, I started from scratch with Svelte 5. This is a modern UI framework with its own compiler built on Typescript. Svelte has its own quirks, like "runes", but it generally allowed me to set up the entire visual novel at a breakneck speed. I still used ink and Inky to write the actual words, because it's such an awesomely powerful narrative scripting language.

In a departure from my previous project, I now show the text in a column layout centered either left or right. This allows me to alternate covering the background on the left or right side, clear the history for better performance, and dramatically improve scene transitions.

A cool feature I added when parsing ink lines is that I extract voice lines by checking for a colon prefix. I use tags to override the styles when necessary:

I also use tags to change backgrounds, text alignment, and show a big title screen:

If that tag formatting looks suspicously like a command-line interface, that's because it is! I use the cmd-ts library to parse the tags as if they were command-line arguments. And yes, I felt like a Big Brain Genius when I first figured this out.

Graphics

One major upgrade from A Royal Pain in the Ass is that I took the effort to make six custom backgrounds for this new visual novel. I'm no artist, but I was able to combine public domain images with Gimp's newspaper filter to create some stylized images. Since it's a free project, I didn't want to pay money for an artist to make actual character art. My hope was that the words would be enough to communicate my intended lewdness.

Feedback

During development, I've had lots of help from the amazing erotica writers on the Erotically Inclined Discord server. Thanks to their feedback, the game is totally playable on phones, and I implemented a save system that stores the story state in your browser's local storage.

Other than that, players have been very positive. I've received several compliments for the well-written dialog, which always feels nice. One playtester actually wanted more choices during sex, which surprised me.

Conclusion

Art is made for the artist. If you like it too, that's great, but it's not really the point. As of writing this article, the Itchio page has 250 views, 84 browser plays, and 0 comments. I'm honored if you give my weird hypnokink visual novel a try, but I don't even want to charge you money for it. Hypnokink is always going to be a weird niche, and many people will be turned off by it. But for the people who enjoy it, there's nothing else like it.

Play Gas Station Dick Pills for free in your browser on Itchio